How To Do My Own Transaction Matching

[David Carlson]

On 12/9/2013 6:11 PM, David Carlson wrote:
> On 12/9/2013 2:04 PM, Michael Iles wrote:
>> I would like to be able to do my own transaction matching and I'm
>> looking for advice on the easiest way to do it.
>>
>> (I find that with the built-in Bayesian matching I still have to
>> inspect every match, many matches aren't automatically made, sometimes
>> the matching history gets lost and I have to start over, etc.)
>>
>> My goal is to automate all of the regular transactions that happen in
>> my account, using heuristics like: (1) if a transaction labeled
>> 'insurance' is in one range then it's my car insurance, if it's in a
>> different range then it's home insurance; (2) utility bills usually
>> have extra numbers so I would look for substrings to match them; etc.
>>
>> (Aside: in my opinion, the perfect system for GnuCash would be the
>> ability to provide a list of regular expressions, along with the
>> destination account to use if the regex matches.)
>>
>> I'm using GnuCash 2.4.13 on OS X, with the XML data store. My
>> transactions are coming into GnuCash via QFX files.
>>
>> My first thought was to use script bindings. I prefer Ruby so I found
>> the 'gnucash' gem [1] but quickly realized that it was read-only.
>>
>> I then looked at the Python bindings [2] but it's not clear to me how
>> to set them up. (Do I need to build GnuCash from source? Do they work
>> on the 2.4 stream?)
>>
>> I then thought that I could parse the QFX and generate QIF files that
>> have both source and destination accounts... I haven't tried this yet,
>> but at first glance I'm not sure that QIF files support both source
>> and destination accounts.
>>
>> (Another aside: it would be wonderful if GnuCash implemented a custom
>> "GnuCash Import" file format that allowed all aspects of a transaction
>> to be specified, including source and destination account.)
>>
>> So now I'm not sure what the best approach is:
>>
>> 1. Would the QIF approach work?
>> 2. Are the Python bindings easy to get working?
>> 3. Should I move to 2.5?
>> 4. Should I move to a SQL data store? I understand that I couldn't
>> write directly to the DB, but is there a DB client library that would
>> allow me to script against the DB?
>> 5. Other bindings I should look at? (Scheme? Guile?)
>>
>> Any advice appreciated.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Mike
>>
>>
>>
>> [1] http://rubydoc.info/github/holtrop/ruby-gnucash/Gnucash
>> [2] http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Python_Bindings
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>>
> Before you go to the trouble to re-invent the wheel, why don't you make
> some suggestions to improve the current OFX importer?
> Perhaps if the importer could be paused and resumed like the Reconcile
> assistant, for example, or if the selected match transaction
> automatically appeared when the mouse hovered over the transaction, or
> if there was a way to override the 'From Account' match if it is wrong,
> or to match to transactions that did not get selected as candidates by
> the Bayesian matcher or if there was a way to re-import transactions
> that were skipped because they had been imported previously.  These are
> a few ideas that could make the OFX importer more user friendly.
>
> Just a suggestion.
>
> David C


I forgot a few.  Show the 'From Account' in the main window.  When there
is more than one 'From Account' in the file, show the others too.
Show check numbers when they are present.  Show a highlight on the last
transaction clicked so the user can see which one the pop-up is
referring to.

David C